Like, say an ordered pair can have repeats such as (1,1), whereas a set can't - {1,1} isn't a valid set.

I don't mean a word to describe whether a thing has or has not been repeated, but whether it's possible for a particular thing to be repeated. (1,0) is an ordered pair without any repeat elements, but because it's an ordered pair, it's elements could've been repeated. A set's elements would never have this possibility.

The closest word I could come up with is just "repetitive", but that's not quite right - saying (1,0) was repetitive would likely raise eyebrows, so I've since dismissed it.

Not familiar with Java, but, in Python, saying something is Iterable simply means that it can be iterated over, such as in a for loop. More practically, that it is broken into discrete elements.
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Kevin MillsJan 17 '14 at 2:30

Most pythons (if not all?) run on JVM. Therefore, iterable is the same betw Java and Python.
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Blessed GeekJan 17 '14 at 3:31

Jython does, the rest don't. And that doesn't really work because we're talking about concepts - in Python, saying something is iterable says nothing about its potential to repeat elements.
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Kevin MillsJan 17 '14 at 3:33

3 Answers
3

If it were me, I would just say that something that can't be repeated is distinct, whereas indistinct could refer to something that could or has been repeated. You could also use unique, but I don't have a good one-word term for the opposite, beside non-unique.

You could also just use repeatable, but that doesn't really seem like what you're going for, since I normally don't here that except when describing actions.

That said, if you're talking to people familiar with mathy concepts and you didn't mention specifically that a group was made of unique/distinct elements, it would probably be assumed that the elements could be repeated.

I like distinct. The only issue is that I'd like a word that I could use to refer to the collection, rather than it's elements.
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Kevin MillsJan 17 '14 at 3:54

And by that I mean that, with distinct, I would say "the collection's elements are distinct" or something along those lines, rather than "the collection is distinct" because that makes it sound like you're comparing two separate collections and declaring them distinct from each other.
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Kevin MillsJan 17 '14 at 3:55

Recurring has the same problem as repetitive. Recurrable sounds closer to what I mean, but I can't find any definitions, so I'm not sure if it's actually a commonly used word.
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Kevin MillsJan 17 '14 at 3:41

And, really, the only math you need to know to understand my examples is that both sets and ordered pairs contain numbers, and ordered pairs can repeat the numbers the contain, while sets can't.
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Kevin MillsJan 17 '14 at 3:42

Recurrable isn't a real word, but there are 31,000 google results for it. Will be in the dictionary soon enough :) Repeatable doesn't fit? -- edit: oops this was already suggested. So?
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PhantasmixJan 17 '14 at 4:57

Why do you think this would work, and why it would be a good/ useful answer?
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KrisJan 17 '14 at 8:26